SPOILER WARNING: This story contains main plot particulars from Season 1, Episode 4 of “Creature Commandos,” at the moment streaming on Max.

When James Gunn first launched Weasel within the 2021 characteristic movie “The Suicide Squad,” he knew that the DC Comics character — both an animalistic human or a human-like animal, relying in your perspective — had not really killed 27 youngsters, opposite to the indictment that landed Weasel in Belle Reve jail.

“I didn’t know the specifics of it, however I at all times knew that it wasn’t truthful,” Gunn says.

It wasn’t till Gunn introduced Weasel again for the animated DC sequence “Creature Commandos” that he lastly received to kind out the small print of how this mild beast was unjustly branded a baby killer. Because the titular squad works by their mission involving Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova), every episode of the sequence, all of them written by Gunn, examines one among their backstories. Episode 4, titled “Chasing Squirrels,” is Weasel’s flip within the highlight. And good gravy, is it bleak.

“I get actually unhappy speaking about it,” Gunn says, his voice rising uncharacteristically quiet. “I bear in mind ending [writing] it. I used to be in Colorado with my spouse, and I bear in mind I stated, ‘I feel I simply wrote the saddest factor that I’ve ever written in my whole life.’”

Unfolding over a sequence of flashbacks, Weasel’s story begins when he emerges from the woods behind an elementary college, the place he encounters a gaggle of youngsters taking part in throughout Thanksgiving break. The place Weasel got here from, and what he really is, are left a thriller, but it surely’s plainly apparent to the youngsters that he’s a candy natured animal who means them no hurt. All of them have a blast taking part in collectively, however when an previous man passes by, he misinterprets Weasel’s habits as threatening — for no actual cause apart from he assumes a large furry animal can be innately menacing — so he races again to his cabin to name 911 and seize his shotgun.

At that very same second, one of many children discovers that the again door to the varsity was left unlocked. Once they all run inside, Weasel follows, and retains taking part in with the children as they fiddle and wind up within the college’s basement boiler room. A sequence of happenstance errors — taking part in with (however not ingesting) a instructor’s bottle of booze, placing a field of matches subsequent to a field of soiled rags — results in a hearth, simply because the previous man seems and begins firing at Weasel. The boiler explodes, killing the person and all the youngsters save for one little lady — which is when two cops peer down into the basement, and see Weasel surrounded by their our bodies whereas he tries to pull the lady to security amid the raging hearth that’s consuming the varsity.

Just like the previous man, they mechanically assume the worst, and open hearth at Weasel as he desperately tries to carry the kid to security. The cops achieve incapacitating Weasel proper as he’s about to succeed in the door, they usually maintain him down as the varsity crumbles across the lady, burying her alive.

“It’s extremely unhappy,” says Sean Gunn, who performed Weasel through efficiency seize in “The Suicide Squad” and does his voice in “Creature Commandos.” Having labored together with his older brother James because the mid-Nineties, Sean says he’s not shocked that Weasel’s story is so bracingly tragic: “James himself is has a darkness, and there’s a darkness to a variety of his work.” The specifics of that darkness, nevertheless, did catch Sean Gunn off guard.

It began with James Gunn’s instruction to Sean that he play Weasel as if he was “an enormous canine.” “Weasel doesn’t suppose in dialogue,” Sean Gunn says. “However for any of us who’ve and love canine, that your canine has a reasonably advanced emotional life. So you set this character by the ringer, and it turns into very relatable — but in addition new. It’s tragic and unhappy, and likewise, I’ve by no means actually seen something like that on tv.”

Sean Gunn recorded the ultimate sequence over a number of recording classes to get it proper, performing Weasel’s actions over an unbroken take as much as his closing, anguished scream because the cops drag him away.

“I used to be slightly sick after we did it the primary time, and the scream wasn’t even like 1/5 of what it wanted to be, actually,” he says. “After we went again, we knew we actually wanted to get the scream.”

Animated, the sequence proved to be simply as difficult, given the harrowing actuality that a number of youngsters had been dying on display. “We went by a variety of iterations of that entire sequence,” says government producer Dean Lorey. “It was troublesome to seek out precisely the precise tone for it. We did need you to really feel the emotion and the horror of what was occurring. However we didn’t need to be exploitive.”

For James Gunn, the episode is the newest instance of his penchant for specializing in characters who’re grossly misunderstood by wider society. “On the finish of the day, [Weasel], in a variety of methods, is essentially the most noble character within the present,” he says. “This can be a fairly harmless creature who’s handled like one thing else as a result of he seems completely different than different individuals.”

And it appears Weasel’s tragic story isn’t over but.

“You’ll see every little thing together with his backstory come into play within the later episodes,” James Gunn teases. “In case you speak in regards to the characters present on some type of continuum from good to dangerous, he’s just about on the nice aspect.”